Showing papers by "HEC Montréal published in 2015"

Mergers when prices are negotiated: Evidence from the hospital industry

Abstract: In recent years, many hospitals have merged, in part to gain bargaining leverage with managed care organizations (MCOs). We investigate the price impact of hospital mergers by formulating and estimating an equilibrium bargaining model between hospital systems and managed care health insurers over prices for inpatient services. We estimate the parameters of the model using claims and discharge data from Northern Virginia. In 2006, Inova Health System proposed to acquire Prince William Hospital. We nd that this merger would have raised prices signicantly and that the remedy of separate bargaining imposed by the FTC in a separate hospital case would have resulted in a larger price increase.

Reconceptualizing competitive dynamics: : A multidimensional framework

Abstract: Competitive dynamics research, despite progress, lacks a conceptual framework that can extend the field's reach to address today's environment. Increasing stakeholder power and globalization are but two of the organizational and economic forces compelling a broader conceptualization of competition. Our framework expands competitive dynamics along five dimensions—aims of competition, mode of competing, roster of actors, action toolkit, and time horizon of interaction—that prove useful for contrasting the rivalrous and competitive-cooperative modes and a new approach we call relational competition. We draw conjectures about the moderators, such as industry and culture, that determine the appropriateness of these forms of interaction, and conclude by relating our method to three discrete perspectives: the configurational, transaction cost, and stakeholder views.

Effects of home telemonitoring interventions on patients with chronic heart failure: an overview of systematic reviews.

Abstract: Background: Growing interest on the effects of home telemonitoring on patients with chronic heart failure (HF) has led to a rise in the number of systematic reviews addressing the same or very similar research questions with a concomitant increase in discordant findings. Differences in the scope, methods of analysis, and methodological quality of systematic reviews can cause great confusion and make it difficult for policy makers and clinicians to access and interpret the available evidence and for researchers to know where knowledge gaps in the extant literature exist. Objective: This overview aims to collect, appraise, and synthesize existing evidence from multiple systematic reviews on the effectiveness of home telemonitoring interventions for patients with chronic heart failure (HF) to inform policy makers, practitioners, and researchers. Methods: A comprehensive literature search was performed on MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library to identify all relevant, peer-reviewed systematic reviews published between January 1996 and December 2013. Reviews were searched and screened using explicit keywords and inclusion criteria. Standardized forms were used to extract data and the methodological quality of included reviews was appraised using the AMSTAR (assessing methodological quality of systematic reviews) instrument. Summary of findings tables were constructed for all primary outcomes of interest, and quality of evidence was graded by outcome using the GRADE (Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) system. Post-hoc analysis and subgroup meta-analyses were conducted to gain further insights into the various types of home telemonitoring technologies included in the systematic reviews and the impact of these technologies on clinical outcomes. Results: A total of 15 reviews published between 2003 and 2013 were selected for meta-level synthesis. Evidence from high-quality reviews with meta-analysis indicated that taken collectively, home telemonitoring interventions reduce the relative risk of all-cause mortality (0.60 to 0.85) and heart failure-related hospitalizations (0.64 to 0.86) compared with usual care. Absolute risk reductions ranged from 1.4%-6.5% and 3.7%-8.2%, respectively. Improvements in HF-related hospitalizations appeared to be more pronounced in patients with stable HF: hazard ratio (HR) 0.70 (95% credible interval [Crl] 0.34-1.5]). Risk reductions in mortality and all-cause hospitalizations appeared to be greater in patients who had been recently discharged (≤28 days) from an acute care setting after a recent HF exacerbation: HR 0.62 (95% CrI 0.42-0.89) and HR 0.67 (95% CrI 0.42-0.97), respectively. However, quality of evidence for these outcomes ranged from moderate to low suggesting that further research is very likely to have an important impact on our confidence in the observed estimates of effect and may change these estimates. The post-hoc analysis identified five main types of non-invasive telemonitoring technologies included in the systematic reviews: (1) video-consultation, with or without transmission of vital signs, (2) mobile telemonitoring, (3) automated device-based telemonitoring, (4) interactive voice response, and (5) Web-based telemonitoring. Of these, only automated device-based telemonitoring and mobile telemonitoring were effective in reducing the risk of all-cause mortality and HF-related hospitalizations. More research data are required for interactive voice response systems, video-consultation, and Web-based telemonitoring to provide robust conclusions about their effectiveness. Conclusions: Future research should focus on understanding the process by which home telemonitoring works in terms of improving outcomes, identify optimal strategies and the duration of follow-up for which it confers benefits, and further investigate whether there is differential effectiveness between chronic HF patient groups and types of home telemonitoring technologies. [J Med Internet Res 2015;17(3):e63]

Necessity entrepreneurship and competitive strategy

Abstract: Many start-ups chose to compete with incumbent firms using one of two generic strategies: cost leadership or differentiation. Our study demonstrates how this choice depends on whether the start-up was founded out of necessity. Our results, based on a representative data set of 4,568 German start-ups, show that necessity entrepreneurs are more likely than other entrepreneurs to pursue a cost leadership strategy and less likely to pursue a differentiation strategy. Decomposition analyses further show that up to half of the difference in choice of strategy can be attributed to distinct endowments of human capital, socioeconomic attributes, and start-up project characteristics that correlate with necessity entrepreneurship.

Patients as partners: a qualitative study of patients' engagement in their health care.

Abstract: To advocate for patients to be more actively involved with the healthcare services they receive, particularly patients living with chronic illness, the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Montreal and its affiliated hospitals developed the Patients as Partners concept where the patient is considered a full-fledged partner of the health care delivery team and the patient’s experiential knowledge is recognized. This study aims to show how patients view their engagement with healthcare professionals regarding their direct care. Using theoretical sampling, 16 semi-structured interviews were conducted with patients with chronic illness who were familiar with the concept of Patients as Partners. Data analysis followed a constructivist grounded theory approach. Patients describe themselves as proactively engaging in three types of practice, regardless of health professionals’ openness to their role as partners. The first is a process of continuous learning that allows them to acquire experiential knowledge about their health, as well as scientific information and technical know-how. The second involves their assessment of the healthcare they receive, in terms of its quality and how it aligns with their personal preferences. It includes their assessment of the quality of their relationship with the health professional and of the latter’s scientific knowledge and technical know-how. The third type, adaptation practices, builds on patients’ learning and assessments to compensate for and adapt to what has been perceived as optimal or non-optimal health or healthcare circumstances. Patients appear to play a more active and less docile role in their own direct care than suggested so far in the literature, regardless of the degree of reciprocity of the partnership or the degree to which the health professional seeks to encourage patient engagement.

Benders Decomposition for Production Routing Under Demand Uncertainty

Abstract: The production routing problem (PRP) is a generalization of the inventory routing problem and concerns the production and distribution of a single product from a production plant to multiple customers using capacitated vehicles in a discrete- and finite-time horizon. In this study, we consider the stochastic PRP with demand uncertainty in two-stage and multistage decision processes. The decisions in the first stage include production setups and customer visit schedules, while the production and delivery quantities are determined in the subsequent stages. We introduce formulations for the two problems, which can be solved by a branch-and-cut algorithm. To handle a large number of scenarios, we propose a Benders decomposition approach, which is implemented in a single branch-and-bound tree and enhanced through lower-bound lifting inequalities, scenario group cuts, and Pareto-optimal cuts. For the multistage problem, we also use a warm start procedure that relies on the solution of the simpler two-stage prob...

Things Fall Apart: The Dynamics of Brand Audience Dissipation

Abstract: Much prior work illuminates how fans of a brand can contribute to the value enjoyed by other members of its audience, but little is known about any processes by which fans contribute to the dissipation of that audience. Using longitudinal data on America's Next Top Model , a serial brand, and conceptualizing brands as assemblages of heterogeneous components, this article examines how fans can contribute to the destabilization of a brand's identity and fuel the dissipation of audiences of which they have been members. This work suggests that explanations focusing on satiation, psychology, or semiotics are inadequate to account for dissipation in the audience for serial brands. Moreover, the perspective advanced here highlights how fans can create doppelganger brand images and contribute to the co-destruction of serial brands they have avidly followed.

When is human capital a valuable resource? The performance effects of Ivy league selection among celebrated CEOs

Abstract: We investigate whether and when highly trained human capital constitutes a rent-sustaining resource. Our study of 444 CEOs celebrated on the covers of major U.S. business magazines found an advantage accruing to graduates of selective universities. Such CEOs led firms with higher and more sustained market valuations. The advantage was strongest for undergraduate programs as these related to the kinds of talent demanded of a CEO. The advantage also was greatest in smaller firms where CEO discretion might be highest and for younger CEOs who may benefit most from college and are less able to appropriate rents. Finally, the advantage accrued to graduates of more recent years, when selective schools had become less socially elitist and increasingly meritocratic, thus favoring human versus social capital. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Introduction: What is Strategy as Practice?

Abstract: In recent years, Strategy as Practice has emerged as a distinctive approach for studying strategic management, organizational decision-making and managerial work (Whittington 1996 ; Johnson et al . 2003 ; Jarzabkowski et al . 2007 ). It focuses on the micro-level social activities, processes and practices that characterize organizational strategy and strategizing. This provides not only an organizational perspective into strategy but also a strategic angle for examining the process of organizing, and thereby serves as a useful research programme and social movement for connecting contemporary strategic management research with practiceoriented organizational studies. Strategy as Practice can be regarded as an alternative to the mainstream strategy research via its attempt to shift attention away from merely a focus on the effects of strategies on performance alone to a more comprehensive, in-depth analysis of what actually takes place in strategic planning, strategy implementation and other activities that deal with strategy. In other words, Strategy as Practice research is interested in the ‘black box’ of strategy work that once led the research agenda in strategic management research (Mintzberg 1973 ; Mintzberg and Waters 1985 ; Pettigrew 1973 ), but has thereafter been replaced by other issues, not least because of the increasing dominance of the micro-economic approach and a methodological preoccupation with statistical analysis. Because of its micro-level focus, studies following the Strategy as Practice agenda tend to draw on theories and apply methods that differ from the common practices of strategy scholars. In this way, Strategy as Practice research can contribute to the evolution of strategic management as a discipline and body of knowledge with new theories and methodological choices. It would, however, be a mistake not to link Strategy as Practice research to the broader ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social sciences. In fact, ‘practice’ has emerged as a key concept for understanding central questions about how agency and structure, and individual action and institutions are linked in social systems, cultures and organizations (Bourdieu 1990 ; Foucault 1977 ; Giddens 1984 ; de Certeau 1984 ; Sztompka 1991 ; Schatzki 2002 ). This practice turn is visible in many areas of the social sciences today, including organizational research (Brown and Duguid 1991 ; Orlikowski 2000 ; Nicolini et al . 2003 ). It is about time that we utilized this paradigm to enrich our understanding of organizational strategizing. ‘Practice’ is a very special concept in that it allows researchers to engage in a direct dialogue with practitioners. Studying practices enables one to examine issues that are directly relevant to those who are dealing with strategy, either as strategists engaged in strategic planning or other activities linked with strategy, or as those who have to cope with the strategies and their implications. By so doing, studies under this broad umbrella promise to accomplish something which is rare in contemporary management and organization research: to advance our theoretical understanding in a way that has practical relevance for managers and other organizational members. Like any emergent research approach, Strategy as Practice can either develop into a clearly defi ned but narrow theoretico-methodological perspective, or it can grow into an open and versatile research programme that is constantly stretching its boundaries. A key motivation behind this handbook is to

Scheduling Twin Yard Cranes in a Container Block

Abstract: Annually, millions of containers enter and exit the stacking area of a terminal. If the stacking operations are not efficient, long ship, train, and truck delays will result. To improve the stacking operations, new container terminals, especially in Europe, decouple the landside and seaside by deploying twin automated stacking cranes. The cranes cannot pass each other and must be separated by a safety distance. We study how to schedule twin automated cranes to carry out a set of container storage and retrieval requests in a single block of a yard. Storage containers are initially located at the seaside and landside input/output I/O points of the block. Each must be stacked in a specific location of the block, selected from a set of open locations suitable for stacking the storage container. Retrieval containers are initially located in the block and must be delivered to the I/O points. Based on the importance and acceptable waiting times of different modes of transport, requests have different priorities. The problem is modeled as a multiple asymmetric generalized traveling salesman problem with precedence constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan. We have developed an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic to quickly compute near-optimal solutions. We have performed extensive computational experiments to assess the performance of the heuristic including validation at a real terminal. It obtains near-optimal solutions for small instances. For large instances, it is shown to yield better solutions than CPLEX truncated after four hours, and it outperforms other heuristics from practice by more than 24% in terms of makespan. The average gaps between our heuristic and optimal solutions for relaxed problems are less than 3%.

Seeking commonalities or avoiding differences? Re-conceptualizing distance and its effects on internationalization decisions

Abstract: Past research established distance’s key influence on internationalization. However, theoretical issues, methodological challenges, and inconsistent results hinder scholarship on why distance plays such an influential role. To address these problems, we draw from cognitive research on similarity comparisons to re-conceptualize distance and test a model of internationalization decisions. Analyzing the verbal protocols of executives considering a series of internationalization opportunities, we demonstrate that, over and above objective distance indicators, considerations that reduce distance (commonalities) and considerations that augment distance (differences) have distinct effects on decisions of where, when, and how to internationalize. As such, our study contributes new insights for understanding the nature and effects of distance, across different dimensions of distance and internationalization decisions. Moreover, internationalization theories have come to emphasize different theoretical rationales for explaining the influential role of distance on different decisions. By integrating these rationales together with the notion that distance-reducing commonalities and distance-augmenting differences have distinct implications for internationalization decisions, we introduce the notion that it is not only the addition of distance considerations that matters but also the directionality of such changes. Doing so, our study points to new theoretical and methodological insights to help address prior criticisms and advance future research.

The inefficiency of worker time use

Abstract: Much work is carried out in short, interrupted segments. This phenomenon, which we label task juggling, has been overlooked by economists. We study the work schedules of some judges in Italy documenting that they do juggle tasks and that juggling causally lowers their productivity substantially. To measure the size of this effect, we show that although all these judges receive the same workload, those who juggle more trials at once instead of working sequentially on few of them at each unit of time, take longer to complete their portfolios of cases. Task juggling seems to have no adverse effect on the quality of the judges' decisions, as measured by the percent of decisions appealed. To identify these causal effects we estimate models with judge fixed effects and we exploit the lottery assigning cases to judges. We discuss whether task juggling can be viewed as inefficient, and provide a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the social cost of longer trials due to task juggling.

A multi-compartment vehicle routing problem arising in the collection of olive oil in Tunisia☆

Abstract: We introduce, model and solve to optimality a rich multi-product, multi-period and multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with a required compartment cleaning activity. This real-life application arises in the olive oil collection process in Tunisia, where regional collection offices dispose of a fleet of vehicles to collect one or several grades of olive oil from a set of producers. For each grade, the quantity offered by a producer changes dynamically over the planning horizon. We first provide a mathematical formulation of the problem, along with a set of known and new valid inequalities. We then propose an exact branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the problem. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm on real data sets under different transportation scenarios to demonstrate to our industrial partner the advantages of using multi-compartment vehicles.

Transparency in the Financial System: Rollover Risk and Crises

Abstract: We present a theory of optimal transparency when banks are exposed to rollover risk. Disclosing bank-specific information enhances the stability of the financial system during crises, but has a destabilizing effect in normal economic times. Thus, the regulator optimally increases transparency during crises. Under this policy, however, information disclosure signals a deterioration of economic fundamentals, which gives the regulator ex post incentives to withhold information. This commitment problem precludes a disclosure policy that provides ex ante optimal insurance against aggregate shocks, and can result in excess opacity that increases the likelihood of a systemic crisis

Decision Making Under Uncertainty When Preference Information Is Incomplete

Abstract: We consider the problem of optimal decision making under uncertainty but assume that the decision maker's utility function is not completely known. Instead, we consider all the utilities that meet some criteria, such as preferring certain lotteries over other lotteries and being risk averse, S-shaped, or prudent. These criteria extend the ones used in the first-and second-order stochastic dominance framework. We then give tractable formulations for such decision-making problems. We formulate them as robust utility maximization problems, as optimization problems with stochastic dominance constraints, and as robust certainty equivalent maximization problems. We use a portfolio allocation problem to illustrate our results. This paper was accepted by Dimitris Bertsimas, optimization.

Appointing Women to Boards: Is There a Cultural Bias?

Abstract: Companies that are serious about corporate governance and business ethics are turning their attention to gender diversity at the most senior levels of business (Institute of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Briefing 21:1, 2011). Board gender diversity has been the subject of several studies carried out by international organizations such as Catalyst (Increasing gender diversity on boards: Current index of formal approaches, 2012), the World Economic Forum (Hausmann et al., The global gender gap report, 2010), and the European Board Diversity Analysis (Is it getting easier to find women on European boards? 2010). They all lead to reports confirming the overall relatively low proportion of women on boards and the slow pace at which more women are being appointed. Furthermore, the proportion of women on corporate boards varies much across countries. Based on institutional theory, this study hypothesizes and tests whether this variation can be attributed to differences in cultural settings across countries. Our analysis of the representation of women on boards for 32 countries during 2010 reveals that two cultural characteristics are indeed associated with the observed differences. We use the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede (Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values, 1980) to measure this construct. Results show that countries which have the greatest tolerance for inequalities in the distribution of power and those that tend to value the role of men generally exhibit lower representations of women on boards.

To Regulate Or Not To Regulate? Early Evidence on the Means Used Around the World to Promote Gender Diversity in the Boardroom

Abstract: Despite the growing public concern in recent years about the place of women in business, gender diversity in corporate governance has made little progress. As a consequence, the issue has captured the worldwide attention of policymakers. Several countries are currently adopting or considering the adoption of laws or regulations to promote gender diversity on corporate boards. The purpose of this paper is to compare the effectiveness of using legislative or regulatory means to increase female representation instead of allowing firms to voluntarily fix their own non-legally binding targets. We find that the relation between gender diversity and performance is positive in countries using the voluntary approach while it is negative in countries using the regulatory approach. We conclude that public policy aimed at increasing the number of women on corporate boards should be introduced gradually and voluntarily rather than quickly and coercively to avoid sub-optimal board composition

Shared mobility systems

Abstract: Shared mobility systems for bicycles and cars have grown in popularity in recent years and have attracted the attention of the operational research community. Researchers have investigated several problems arising at the strategic, tactical and operational levels. This survey paper classifies the relevant literature under five main headings: station location, fleet dimensioning, station inventory, rebalancing incentives, and vehicle repositioning. It closes with some open research questions.

Creating and Maintaining a Safe Space in Experiential Learning

Abstract: The increasing popularity of experiential learning in management education raises a number of new opportunities and challenges for instructors, particularly with regard to shifting instructor roles and attention to learning through one’s emotions. In this article, we draw on psychodynamics—in particular D. W. Winnicott’s notions of “transitional space” and “holding”—to delineate what a safe space might look like in a management education context. We propose that experiential learning can result in deeper learning when conducted in such a space, which consists of appropriate physical aspects, trust, respect, suspension of judgment and censorship, a willingness to share, and high-quality listening. We further propose that a safe space can be developed and maintained by creating a strong container early on, establishing ground rules, providing lessons in listening and witnessing, teaching by example, and developing a reflexive attitude.